There have been proposed several apparatus for piling up filter rods in a container. (See, Japanese Patent Application Publication Nos. 43-23995, 44-5439, 46-27360 and 47-19759.) However, these apparatus have been made only for the step of feeding filter rods directly into a container through, for example, a belt conveyor, a plurality of guide grooves, a suction plate for sucking up every layer of filter rods, etc. There has been proposed no device for the treatment of the filter rods after they have been carried into a hopper or a container.
In this connection, it should be noted that, according to the conventional methods or apparatus, the number of filter rods piled in a box is not always constant and that there are sometimes formed undesired spaces between filter rods in the box. To prevent the above troubles, there have been taken certain measures, for example, manually vibrating the box and adjusting the number of the filter rods by inserting filter rods one by one into the spaces, which takes much more time. Accordingly there have been caused several social problems such as security of manpower, a wage problem, etc.
A method and an apparatus for orderly and precise piling of filter rods have been eagerly expected in order to efficiently deal with filter rods which are produced at a very high speed, for example 4,000 pieces per hour, and to speedily pack the fixed number of filter rods into a container of fixed size.
The present invention has been made to overcome the conventional disadvantages and to meet the demand as discussed above, and therefore it is a primary object of the present invention to provide an apparatus for piling rodshaped articles such as filter rods, wherein the fixed number of filter rods can be easily and precisely packed in an orderly pile in a container at a high speed.
In one aspect of the present invention there is provided a method for piling up rod-shaped articles in an orderly pile in a container comprising temporarily collecting rod-shaped articles in a hopper member, levelling with distributing the collected rod-shaped articles in an orderly pile in the hopper member, and pushing out in the horizontal direction the rod-shaped articles into the container by means of a push means while maintaining the piled-up state of the rod-shaped articles.
In another aspect of the present invention there is provided an apparatus for piling up rod-shaped articles in an orderly pile in a container comprising a hopper member, a push means adapted to move in the horizontal direction transversing the lower portion of said hopper member, and a means for lowering a container in synchronism with said push means, said hopper member comprising a levelling means for distributing and levelling the rod-shaped articles in the hopper member.